Kansas Part 1 - STR-2021-5

Sunday, 13 June

As we left Knob Noster, MO, driving on the farmland backroads of Missouri, the unevenness of the roads had Sprinty rocking and swaying like a small boat rocking in the waves on the ocean. Even on US 54. Crossing into Kansas on US 54, the roads smoothed out like a boat entering the protected waters of an inland waterway.

Our original plan was to visit the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, and the Arabia Steamboat Museum in Kansas City, Missouri next. A check of the Truman library website found it closed for renovations. Fortunately, both are on the itinerary of Sprinty's planned adventure next summer. So we altered course.

Our new destination became The Fort Scott National Historic Site in Fort Scott, Kansas (https://www.nps.gov/fosc/index.htm). Representing a military fort of the 1840s, much of Fort Scott's story focuses on the role of the U.S. Army on the frontier. The site interprets the 1840s era with interpretive exhibits, period furnishings, and living history programs that include soldiers drilling on horseback and artillery demonstrations.

The site preserves 20 historic structures, eleven of which are original buildings, the others are reconstructions built on the original foundations. The site is furnished to the 1840s era, but the story told here encompasses three decades of American history.

From the Park brochure: "The story of Fort Scott is the story of America growing up. When the fort was established in 1842, the nation was still young and confined largely to the area east of the Mississippi River. Yet within a few years, Fort Scott soldiers became involved in events that would lead to tremendous spurts of growth and expansion. As the nation developed, tensions over slavery led to the conflict and turmoil of "Bleeding Kansas" and the Civil War."

From 1842-53, it was a military fort established to protect the Permanent Indian Frontier; soldiers kept peace between white settlers and American Indian tribes, patrolled overland trails and fought in the Mexican-American War. The fort was closed in 1853 as the frontier spread further westward. Two years later, the buildings were sold at auction and the fort became a town. The town was involved in the "Bleeding Kansas" era from 1854-61 when Kansans fought each other over the issue of slavery. There were episodes of violence and intrigue on the grounds of Fort Scott NHS during that era. During the Civil War, the United States Army returned to Fort Scott and established a military base that included many of the former fort buildings. Civil War Fort Scott functioned as a Union supply base, hospital complex, training ground and recruitment center.

We started at the Visitor Center which is located in the original hospital building. After some tips and information from the Ranger, we watched the video about the Fort. We then toured the exhibits.

An interesting fact about the Fort was that when the buildings were auctioned off in the 1850s, one building became the pro-slavery hotel while a building across the square became the free state hotel.

After our tour, we wandered the historic downtown. There wasn't much to see as everything was closed on a Sunday morning.

We then headed to Iola, KS, for a bike ride. Originally, we picked the Prairie Spirit Trail (https://www.traillink.com/trail/prairie-spirit-trail-state-park-/) which runs 51 miles from Iola north to Ottowa. When we arrived, we found that the 6.5 mile Praire Spirit Trail connected to the Southwind Rail Trail (https://www.traillink.com/trail/southwind-rail-trail/). The trail is essentially a southern extension of the 51-mile Prairie Spirit Trail. As the TrailLink entry showed a photo of a railroad bridge, we thought it might be more interesting.

We rode to the trail end in Humboldt and never saw a railroad bridge.

Upon returning to Iola, we rode through the city center. Again, not much to see on a Sunday.

As we often do, we had a Plan A and a Plan B for where to overnight. We decided to stretch a bit with driving for the day and position ourselves for tomorrow's adventures. So on to Plan C which was to stay in the Santa Fe Trail Campground in Council Grove, KS, one of several Corps of Engineers (COE) campgrounds by the lake. A benefit to a COE campground is that they are discounted by 50% with the Senior Pass. A check of ReserveAmerica showed several sites as "walk-up" only. With several sites seemingly available, we thought getting a site would be a non-issue on a Sunday. When we arrived, there was only one site available. Fortunately, it was a nice, level site. And $11 for the night.

Monday, 14 June

With Sprinty's stay last night in Kansas, he adds his 38th state sticker to the map.

Today's adventures have been planned to include driving the Flint Hills National Scenic Byway (http://www.naturalkansas.org/flint.htm), a two-lane, paved road that stretches 47.2 miles across the Flint Hills of Kansas on K-177 between Council Grove and Cassoday in east central Kansas. This byway was designated a National Scenic Byway on September 22, 2005.

The Flint Hills, historically known as Bluestem Pastures or Blue Stem Hills, are a region in eastern Kansas and north-central Oklahoma named for the abundant residual flint eroded from the bedrock that lies near or at the surface. It consists of a band of hills stretching from Kansas to Oklahoma, extending from Marshall and Washington Counties in the north to Cowley County, Kansas and Kay and Osage Counties in Oklahoma in the south, to Geary and Shawnee Counties west to east. Oklahomans generally refer to the same geologic formation as the Osage Hills or "the Osage."

We got started before it got warm in order to arrive at the Tall Grass National Preserve Visitor Center (https://www.nps.gov/tapr/index.htm) when they opened at 8:30AM.

Ranger Mary gave us an overview of the Visitor Center exhibits and the ranch buildings built in 1878.

Tall grass prairie ones covered 140,000,000 acres of North America. Now less than 4% remains, mostly in the Flint Hills of Kansas. After John Deere invented the steel mold board plow - it could cut tough prairie sod - settling and cultivating the prairie grew by leaps and bounds. In less than a generation, the Prairie soil was broken, the land settled and forever changed.

The visitor center had many exhibits showing the tall grass prairie in different seasons, and the various ecosystems that depended on the tall grass prairie.

After watching the short video about the Flint Hills and touring the ranch buildings, we selected a couple of the hiking trails to explore. With over 40 miles of trails and high temperatures forecast to get to the min-90s, we picked trails that totaled just over 2 miles. We started on the Scenic Overlook Trail.

Upon reaching the Windmill Pasture, we viewed the bison from a distance. There were numerous warnings about not disturbing the bison and maintaining a distance of 100 yards.

We turned on the Prairie Fire Loop, then the Davis Trail to the Lower Fox Creek School building, then back to the ranch.

A very pleasant stop - we enjoyed learning more about the history of this part of Kansas. And getting a hike in.

With a lot of the day left, we had planned to play golf at Prairie Trails Public Golf Course in El Dorado, KS. Before we stretched with the driving yesterday, we had made a tee time for 2:30pm. Finishing the Tallgrass Prairie hikes early (taking advantage of the cooler morning temperatures), we were running early, and called to move our tee time up to 12:30.

When we arrived, there were only 8 cars in the parking lot. We got right on. We both played well, with the score neck-and-neck for most of the round. Darrell managed to just squeak out honors on the day in just over 2 hours.

For a municipal course, the course conditions were pretty nice, and the staff were super friendly. A good choice of course to play. Particularly as nine hole golf courses outnumber 18 hole golf courses in central and western Kansas.

After a visit to Starbucks to pay up, we made our way to McConnell Air Force Base on the east side of Witchita. We had made a reservation in their FamCamp so we would be nearby for our 9:30AM appointment on the base tomorrow. The base has two Famcamps - FamCamp 1 is the nicer loop with 10 sites and the shower house. FamCamp 2 is mostly a parking lot with electric and water. Just fine for our needs for the night.

Water and electric. Level site. Includes occasional sounds of freedom (military aircraft) and 24/7 gated armed security. And a 1.4 mile/4 minute commute in the morning. For $20/night.

Tuesday, 15 June

The driving reason to be in Wichita, KS today is to renew Kris' dependent ID card which expires at the end of next month. It has to be done at an ID card issuing office, which are typically located on military bases. With our travel style and plans, we typically don't know where we will be more than a couple of days out. As we planned to be near Wichita on our way to Hutchinson, KS, we managed to get an appointment at McConnell Air Force Base, and we just wanted to get that checked off our major to-do list. Much better than when Darrell needed his ID card renewed earlier this year and appointments had to be made 4-6 weeks in advance.

Our experience at McConnell AFB was much better. We were able to get an appointment only a few days before. We arrived at the ID Card office early and they took us immediately. We were in and out in about 10 minutes.

With that major chore completed, we wandered towards Hutchinson, KS. Along the way, we stopped in downtown Wichita to see the Keeper of the Plains (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keeper_of_the_Plains ).

The Keeper of the Plains is a 44-foot tall steel sculpture standing at the point where the Big and Little Arkansas rivers join together in downtown Wichita. This land between the two rivers is sacred ground to the Native American people and is also home to the Mid-America All-Indian Museum. The American Indian sculpture was created by Wichitan and Native American artist Blackbear Bosin (1921-1980). This icon of Wichita was erected on May 18, 1974 to celebrate the United States Bi-centennial and has kept a watchful eye on the city ever since.

We we have made our way west, the terrains has been slowly changing from the rolling hills (I.e., the Flint Hills) that defied our mental image of Kansas, to flat as a pancake northwest of Wichita, confirming the mental image we had.

On to Hutchinson, location of Strataca, formerly called the Kansas Underground Salt Museum (https://www.underkansas.org). We had reservations for the 2pm Salt Blast Tour with the Salt Safari Shuttle. We arrived before noon as our morning appointment at the ID Card office went smoothly. Upon checking in, they bumped us up to the 12:00 noon tour. As the outside temperature was already in the 90s, we were looking forward to spending a few hours in the constant 68 degree temperature of the salt mine.

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strataca): "Strataca is a salt mine museum in Hutchinson, Kansas, United States. It was previously known as the Kansas Underground Salt Museum. The museum is built within one of the world's largest deposits of rock salt and provides the opportunity to go 650 feet (200 m) beneath the Earth's surface. It is a unique destination attraction for exploring an environment carved from salt deposits formed 275 million years ago. The museum is located in the Hutchinson Salt Company mine which began operation in 1923 as Carey Salt Company. There are 14 other salt mines in the United States, but none of them are accessible to tourists."

The Permian Wellington Formation is one of the largest in the world, and the purest portion of the salt vein is 650 feet underground and is still mined from the Hutchinson Salt Member today.

Salt was discovered southwest of Hutchinson in 1887 while drilling for oil, representing the first significant salt discovery west of the Mississippi. The Carey Salt Mine opened in 1923 and remains the only rock salt mine in Reno County. Today it is known as the Hutchinson Salt Company and the original salt mine shaft just northwest of Strataca is still used by the miners today.

After a safety briefing and getting issued hard hats,

we rode the elevator 650 feet down to the layer of salt that is mined. The salt layer is around 400 feet thick, about 300 feet above the mined layer and 80 feet above the bottom of the layer. The layer that is mined is 96-98% pure, where the salt above and below has too many impurities for the original use of the mined salt which was for animal feed. The ride down took 90 seconds and was in complete darkness.

Arriving at the mine, we looked at the museum exhibits which explained the mine operations over the years, the equipment used and the life of a salt miner. The area of the museum is shared with Underground Vault and Storage, a company that provides storage of documents, movie films, movie costumes, and other items requiring secure, constant temperature, low humidity storage.

We toured the exhibits until our 1:30pm Salt Mine Express tour which took us deep into the museum section of the salt mine - the parts mined in the 1930s to 1950s. While the mine is an active mine, present day mine operations were in other sections. There were no lights in the sections of the mine tour - they issued us all LED flashlights to provide light. We enjoyed that a lot - we got to point our flashlight to whatever interested us. Suffice it to say, we got a deeper understanding of the history and process of mining salt. Pun accidental. 😉

The salt is mined using the room and pillar method, like the lead mine in Bonne Terre and as used in coal mines. The miners work a 50 foot wide section, leaving 50 feet by 50 feet pillars to keep the mine from collapsing. Holes are drilled 8 feet deep into the rock face, loaded with explosives and then blasted. The debris from each blast is 250 tons of salt. The broken salt rock is then crushed and moved to the mine shaft where it has to be lifted 650 feet to the surface. Once on the surface, it is loaded on railroad cars for transportation.

In the early days, the salt was mined to a height of 6 feet, then 10 feet, then 13 feet and today, 17 feet. The depth (height) is determined by thin mud lines which leave a beam of salt above intact to support the roof of the mine.

Today, there are about 150 miles of mined out salt. They hold 5K and 10K races in the mine, as well as hold bike rides called the Tour de Salt. Some business meeting are held in the museum part of the mine - companies love it because there is no cell service down in the mine.

Eventually, the salt on the ceiling starts to sag and if is sags enough, you get a roof fall - where salt rock from the ceiling falls to the floor. And the pressure on the column causes the floor to heave. We saw several areas of roof falls, mostly attributed to mistakes in the mining - the miners had compromised the salt beam by mining too high, damaging the overhead salt beam.

The museum opened in May 2007 and is the only active salt mine in the world providing tours.

Our original plan was to overnight at Strateca as it is a Harvest Host. However, with afternoon high temperature of 99 degrees, and Sprinty being parked in an unshaded parking lot for the four hours we were underground, amending the plan to stay at the nearby Sand Hills State Park with electric hookups to be able to use air conditioning seemed like a more prudent choice.  Free camping has its limits.

We arrived at the nearly empty campground after hours, selected a pull-through site (prime) for $22 (compared to $21) for a back-in site. Plus the $5 vehicle entry fee. Probably only 10 campers here tonight in the 64-site campground. The sites are well laid out, with several pull-through sites for the $1 more.